This sort of speculation is always either trivial, tautological or wrong.

By his logic, humans evolved to smoke cigarettes. This is trivially true: Fish, for example, didn't evolve to smoke cigarettes. It's also tautological. If we can do something, we evolved to do it. And, of course, it's also just plain-old nonsense.

That's not normally how people understand the claim that we 'evolved' to do something.

There's a fairly standard distinction often invoked between selection for particular traits and selection of particular traits. The ability to smoke cigarettes would be a fairly obvious 'selection of' case, rather than 'selection for'.

I don't think it's just trivially true, nor is it a uniform claim about anything we "can" do -- the fact that nicotine is stimulating and addicting is part of our evolutionary inheritance, and so it's not surprising or a moral weakness that people smoke cigarettes; the problem is that the cigarettes are around, advertised, etc. He's not claiming anything about our response to nicotine specifically having provided a reproductive benefit in the past.

I'm not saying that we don't have an inheritance that is the result of natural selection. I'd dispute 15 in only a very trivial way: 15 represents the correct way of thinking about evolution. It is Professor Hanscom who speaks for the common - and incorrect - understanding of evolution.

Like Hanscom, everybody knows that we evolved to find fat and sugar delicious. There's certainly a lot of evidence that people prefer it to, say, beans and lemons. Humans wouldn't exist had they not evolved, and therefore they evolved to like sugar and fat, right?

But there's no reason to suppose that people were evolutionarily selected for that preference. You'd be able to make that sort of argument about many types of food, if humans happened to love it the same way. Certainly protein is a pretty key part of human diets. So is vitamin C. If people craved beans and lemons, Hanscom's argument would be equally valid. He's got a one-part test to determine whether something was evolutionarily selected for humans:

-Is it a human trait?

Okay, maybe he's got a second test: Does it fit into some pleasing narrative?

As 15 and 16 point out, that's not a very useful way to think about evolution.

Lieberman's argument in the interview is that we evolved at set of preferences and abilities suited for one type of environment and now live in very different one so our previously evolved dietary preferences are now counterproductive. It isn't an unassailable hypothesis by any means, but I don't think you read the article.

Other than a very very minor quibble that the semi-serious people who promote the paleo diet not only already understand but also fully agree with this guy's critique, I am totally on board with everything this guy says. Evolutionary fitness and aggressive nanny state-ism is pretty much the Halfordismo platform, aside from the palaces, sports cars, all-female bodyguard squad, etc.

But it makes sense for people on the veldt ( non sarcastically!) to crave sugar and fat; food was scarce, and sugar and fat are high calorie and therefore valuable for survival. A strong, universal preference for mint flavor, if it existed, could be dismissed as 'evolved for' in only a tautological sense, but where you have a behavior pattern (craving sugar and fat) that both demonstrably really does exist and which reasonably would support survival 'on the veldt', it means something to say that it was very likely selected for.

The assumption is that food was scarce often enough for it to have mattered for evolution. That seems a safe enough assumption given the high incidence of famine in recorded human history and the amount of starvation you see in nature.

The times when food was scarce are exactly the times when evolution is kicking into high gear, as lots of people are dying off. When food is plentiful and everything is hunky-dory evolution slacks off becuase even the mal-adapted are able to survive and reproduce.

I wouldn't think that food scarcity would have been much of a driving force for evolution at the pre-human primate level. We're fucking omnivores, for chrissakes. Maybe it's there to some extent, but it seems like it that would be dwarfed by evolutionary changes driven by danger-avoidance.

I'm looking forward to 50,000 years for now, when people are living their lives in completely different ways than they do now, and their lifestyles still give them aches and pains, and the evolutionary biologists explain it with, "well, when we all lived on the internet . . ."

This is the catch. Just-so stories are easy to write. The genetics of traits regulated by a single locus are pretty easy to test, and it's possible to show that some allele is selected for, or for older genotypes, that there's selective pressure identified in Ka/Ks ratios. Complex traits like metabolism and fat storage are regulated by many genes, much harder to quantify selection there.

That said, people have started paying a lot of attention recently to Leptin. Basically every time that I read about it, I both learn something new and get sucked into a web of worthwhile background reading about metabolism.

Lieberman's argument in the interview is that we evolved at set of preferences and abilities suited for one type of environment and now live in very different one so our previously evolved dietary preferences are now counterproductive. It isn't an unassailable hypothesis by any means, but I don't think you read the article.

These arguments are invariably characterized by a lot of assumptions about the "ancestral environment" that serve a narrative. I am not claiming to know why some foods are more popular than others. I've got no narrative on that.

But in the "ancestral environment" we lacked access to calories but had (comparitively) easy access to other essential nutrients? Maybe. I'd like to see his evidence.

You could tell the evolutionary story about any nutrient that was scarce (that is to say, any nutrient). The existence of a modern preference is suggestive, but not dispositive.

But in the "ancestral environment" we lacked access to calories but had (comparitively) easy access to other essential nutrients? Maybe. I'd like to see his evidence.

Another way of putting it would be: If you're eating the kind of thing that you hunt or gather on the savannah, you'll have had enough protein and trace nutrients long before you've had enough calories. Vitamin C is in nearly everything, for example, and you need very little of it per day.

You could tell an evolutionary story about any nutrient that was scarce and in the past generation became so cheap that it was available in basically unlimited quantities to a very large portion of the human population. There just aren't many other candidates for that.

53: Gotcha - I've never seen that case made by any method other than assumption - that calories were scarcer than (say) protein in the ancestral diet. (Certainly Vitamin C was an unhelpful choice of counter-example on my part.)

Surely somebody out there has examined this issue. I've never seen it, though.

54: I'm willing to grant the assumption that if a strong preference meets abundance, the natural consequence is large-scale consumption, so it's unnecessary to actually have abundance in order to discuss this effect. All you need is to demonstrate is the craving.

53, 56: This is the sort of thing that should be really easily to establish -- so easy that I thought it was non-controversially accepted not because it was never examined but because the evidence was abundant and not in controversy. Coming up with a 'market basket' of available foods, weighted by scarcity and difficulty to obtain, in different hunter-gatherer environments isn't hard (it might be hard to do with precision, but I think the results are clear enough to not require provision), and doing a nutritional analysis of what's in those foods is also not that hard. My belief is that that work has been done, and reveals that calories, rather than other micronutrients, are the primary bottleneck in a hunter-gatherer diet.

Now, I'm pontificating online, I don't actually have the research at my fingertips. But this is my strong impression of the current state of knowledge.

51: I don't know whether we are talking about the macroevolutionary changes that occurred in very recent evolutionary history leading to the emergence of homo sapiens, or the microevolutionary changes than have occurred within the species homo sapiens over the course of its history. The scale of changes involved, and the factors that led to them, are obviously quite different.

When our hunter-gatherer was chasing that dinosaur*, was he after the fat more than the protein?

I mean, hunting is a shitload of work - and it burns quite a lot of calories. I've always assumed** that it was the protein that motivated the hunt. But maybe protein (like Vitamin C) is easy to come by. Bugs, for instance, are plentiful.

61.1: Whether it goes back to the veldt or not, I don't know. Obviously, food has been short for periods of human history more recent that the paleolithic. That would take more knowledge that I have. I'm arguing against the idea that his work is self-evidently nonsense and tautological.

In 1628 at Warwick castle, Greville was stabbed and killed by Ralph Heywood, a servant who felt he had been cheated in his master's will. Having been stabbed, Greville's physicians treated his wounds by filling them with pig fat rather than disinfecting the cuts. The pig fat turn rancid, infected Greville's cuts and he died in agony four weeks after the attack.

68: Yes, and yes and yes. The incoherent cuntfucks of Outer Cuntfuckistan seem to be demanding some kind of massively over-detdermined demosnstration of the details of evolutionary nutrition in support of Professor Lieberman's anodyne statements (which are really part of a more general lament on short-term evolutionary biases working against long-term issues). Look, we all know there are massive abuses of evolutionary arguments (I think there may be a catchphrase or something) but progressives going full retard on evolution are an even more ridiculous example of smart people acting stupid than when Ted Cruz does it.

73: You're incredulous that people starved to death in the past? I know there are arguments that prior to the greater population densities allowed by agriculture people didn't have large-scale famines as often, but that's not the same as saying paleolithic humans weren't often short enough on food for protections against starvation to have been selected for by evolution.

I am struck by the fact that treatises on pre-historic calories never say what shape the calories had. Perhaps it is the shape of the calories that has evolved--and that it is this internal mismatch of calorie to calorie receptacle(square pegs, etc.), rather than some notional mismatch with the offerings of our external environment, that our atavistic tastes labour against.

paleolithic humans weren't often short enough on food for protections against starvation to have been selected for by evolution

Lactose tolerance seems like a good example within modern humans. People who were lactose tolerant weren't necessarily starving to death because of it, but lactose intoleration seems to have been beneficial enough in certain circumstances to have spread relatively broadly among human populations.

I can't quite follow your argument, but lactose tolerance would only be an issue post-agriculture, right? Hunter-gatherers wouldn't have access to (non-human) milk to find out whether or not they could tolerate it.

94: I thought that lactose intolerance (post childhood) was the baseline state and the lactose tolerance spread relatively quickly, quickly enough to suggest that food pressure was a selector in human populations.

107: I had never heard the term. Nice. And via Wikipedia a semi-on topic passage from Darwin:

... Yet the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry meat, such as that of the Agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, "that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea:" this appears to me a curious physiological fact. It is, perhaps, from their meat regimen that the Gauchos, like other carnivorous animals, can abstain long from food. I was told that at Tandeel, some troops voluntarily pursued a party of Indians for three days, without eating or drinking.

And, to follow on to 131, and just to circle back to my original point, since it seems to have been controversial, although I don't think it should be: since primates aren't starving in the ordinary course, food scarcity isn't the primary driver of primate evolution. Avoiding dangers and attracting mates are more important.

I wonder if that's always true, or just at the moment. What were the pressures that led early hominids to start incorporating so much meat in their diets that they underwent morphological modification to adapt to it? Non-trivial, I suggest.

137: I have no idea if primates ordinarily starve or not*, but food scarcity could drive evolution without starvation since fertility declines to very low levels well before anybody dies from lack of food and periods of food scarcity that aren't close to fatal will hurt chances of mating later in life by making for incomplete development and general being short.

Where are you getting "primates don't starve" from? You're taking it as a premise, and I've never heard anything of the kind before. Modern hunter-gatherers certainly experience food-scarcity sometimes.

142: With weary eyes, Urplik surveyed the icy landscape. Since before the time of his forefather's forefathers each year the Big Ice had crept closer. Food and game became harder to find, but Urplik was nothing if not resourceful and knew that there were many paths to food. Suddenly in the distance he spied a familiar shape! An aquarium!

Orangutans in particular are interesting to study, Vogel said, because they are the only documented species of non-human ape to store fat when food is abundant in the wild and use these fat reserves when preferred fruits become scarce, presumably something done by our early hominin ancestors.

Vogel and her research team, analyzed samples collected over a five-year period to study the effects of protein recycling, which included examining urinary metabolites and nitrogen stable isotopes - compounds and byproducts in Orangutan urine. What they determined is that these primates are able to endure prolonged protein deficits without starving to death by consuming higher protein leaves and inner bark and obtaining energy from their stored body fat and even muscles for an extended period of time when low-protein fruit is unavailable.

Loosely on topic, my gym owner/appealing to me nutcase who had been veering increasingly towards some kind of Italian futurist/protofascist position for a while ("Reason will teach you nothing! Strength and movement create will!") has now moved into weird conspiracy theories about how powerful, non-grain eating hunter gatherers built the original pyramids which were where the Bermuda Triangle is now and then taught the Egyptians how to make them, except the Egyptians introduced slavery (?) At least this is what I can figure out from some weird FB posts of his.

Not sure where the primates don't have food scarcity thing is coming from, but it's a theory (google tells me Richard Wrangham's, specifically) for the differences between chimps and bonobos. He's been saying it for like 20 years now. See here and here.

The answer may lie in the history of the habitats they occupy. Both species of primates live in tropical forests along the Zaire River -- chimps north of the river, bonobos to the south. Their environments seem to be quite similar today. But about 2.5 million years ago, there seems to have been a lengthy drought in southern Zaire that wiped out the preferred food plants of gorillas and sent the primates packing. After the drought ended, the forests returned, but the gorillas did not. Chimpanzees in this environment south of the river had the forest to themselves, and could exploit the fiber foods that had previously been eaten by gorillas -- foods that are still eaten by gorillas to the north. With this additional food to tide them over between fruit trees, they could travel in larger, more stable parties, and form strong social bonds. They became bonobos.

these p/yramids went under water at least 13,000 years ago. There are many p/yramids all over the world and under the o/cean. (C/hina actually buries them with forests) The p/yramids of E/gypt were not built 3000 years ago. Everything we were taught in school about t/his is pretty much impossible to do. The humans of that time must of found them perfectly b/uilt and p/robably e/mptied and put their own p/haroahs into them.

Substance would weigh this thread down, so I'll refrain from providing any. I don't understand how anyone can claim aquatic apes built the pyramids when all overwhelming evidence points to aliens. Also, inquiring minds want to know: what sank Atlantis? My vote is early grain domestication produced a race of morbidly obese proto homo sapiens, and their collective girth sank the island. That or their lack of fitness made them lose the war against Neanderthals, who sank Atlantis out of spite.

Heretic! Everybody knows that anything remotely pyramid shaped was built by the ancient, wise inhabitants of the tunnels beneath the earth (mostly under Tibet). More recently they ancient wise ones have lost interest in pyramids and started building UFOs instead. My guess is that they're Denisovans.

Sometimes it sucks to miss threads in real time, as I definitely fell for Urple's trolling during my late read through. At several points, I kept shaking my computer and (mentally) shouting "OF COURSE PRIMATES AND EARLY HUMANS STARVE. IT'S CALLED WINTER." (Or, for primates still living in the tropics, DROUGHT, FLOODING, etc.)

Von Däniken wrote his first book while working as manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, Switzerland. He was convicted of several financial crimes, including fraud, shortly after its publication. The revenue from the sales of his book allowed him to repay his debts and leave the hotel business. Von Däniken wrote his second book, Gods from Outer Space, while in prison.